Previews

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

Troika stops by, gives us a brief tour of Chinatown and talks about being true to the spirit of the franchise.

Spiffy:

Fascinating use of statistics to affect FPS combat.

Iffy:

May alienate hard-core Vampire fans of RPG purists.

I was recently involved in an interesting discussion with a fan of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game. This person disliked the recent RTS version of the franchise, Dawn of War, because it didn't slavishly follow the rules of the tabletop games. Instead, the developers tried to channel the spirit of the franchise into the best RTS they could make, dumping aspects that may have been true to strict rules of the game in favor of making the experience more fun. I believe they succeeded brilliantly and said so in my review.

What does this have to do with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you ask? Simple. In past demonstrations of their Source-powered RPG, Troika has gone to great lengths to point out how true they're being to the franchise. While all of that still stands, when they recently stopped by GameSpy to show off the Chinatown hub of the game, the conversation revolved around what was going to be different. Troika's looking to channel the spirit of Vampire: The Masquerade -- to reach that "aha!" place where a gamer feels that this a true Vampire experience, even if some of the nitty gritty details have been changed.

"We had two parallel tracks going on while we put Bloodlines together," Troika's Leonard Boyarsky said as he ran his Ventrue vampire through a conversation with the sexy leader of the Kuei-Jin. The Kuei-jin are Asian vampires -- mostly from China -- who labor under a completely different curse than their Western counterparts. Apparenlty during testing, there were certain employees who really focused on the RPG aspects of the game, the conversations and the storyline. "On the other hand, we had some of our younger testers who kept coming up to us and saying that what the game needed was much more combat." Boyarsky said. It seems that having people push and pull from both sides of the divide actually contributed to making a better combined game than it might have been otherwise.

"We wanted to make sure that however the player chose to work his way through the game, it'd be both possible and fun," Boyarsky said. To illustrate how, he talked about how two different Troika employees approached Bloodlines. "We had one guy who just put all of his skill points into social and stealth skills," he said, "and never did more combat than what was absolutely required by the game." According to Boyarsky, it is completely possible to finish the game using nothing more than sneakiness and a silver tongue (although combat can't be avoided completely). He warns, however, that it isn't easy. Every potential situation where there might be combat has to be analyzed carefully and levels scoured for bonuses and power-ups. Still, as tough as the challenge is for the player, it was even tougher for the team who had balance the game for exactly this type of extreme RPG fan.

"One of the most frequent questions we get from Vampire fans is exactly how 'linear' this game is going to be," Boyarsky said. The subtext of that question, of course, is that "pure" RPG gamers would like something that's currently impossible -- total freedom to explore a world that's totally responsive to the player. Until somebody invents Star Trek's holodeck, though, Troika is offering the next best thing -- experiential choice. The analogy Boyarsky uses is to imagine driving from New York to Los Angeles. There are plenty of different ways to get there, but everyone who takes the trip will end up at the same destination and may even stop at a few of the same roadside attractions, but ultimately, their experiences will be unique.